Nail Biter (33 page)

“Mah!” Lee shouted gleefully as Ellie climbed onto the jump seat in back; then George closed the door, putting the light out.

“Wade,” I began, intending to say
I'm sorry
.

He pressed my head to his shoulder. “Don't say it. Just . . . you screwed up, you and Ellie. But if you hadn't, the girl might be dead now. You'd have to live with that.”

He held me away from him, looked into my face. “That you hadn't even tried,” he said. “And anyway, if I'd wanted someone else, that's who I'd have married.”

I leaned against him once more; it was all I'd wanted to hear. “The saddest thing is, I don't think Jenna ever once even asked anyone for help,” I said.

Brief silence from Wade. Then, “Tell me about it,” he said, his tone communicating perfectly his clear understanding of the relationship between pots, kettles, and the color black.

Whereupon I wisely decided to shut up, as the ambulance howled off toward Route 1 and the hospital in Calais. After that, George and Wade pulled Ellie's boat farther up the beach so the storm wouldn't carry it away, and Bob Arnold cornered me.

I gave him the short version, with emphasis on Jenna still being in the water. But squinting out over the dark roiling bay as he listened, his face confirmed what I already feared: that by now the waves had surely finished what her thirst for vengeance began.

“Won't have to arrest her,” Bob said as if this were some consolation.

Which for Jenna maybe it would have been. “State cops checking on her found a warrant out of Massachusetts,” he added. “Seems there's quite a collection of contraband missing out of the evidence room where she was on the job last.”

“Right,” I said inadequately. “Probably there is.” Tiredly I finished summing up the night's events. Now that the adrenaline was draining from my system, my legs felt as if they were turning to water.

“Christ,” said Bob when I was through. “What a sorry mess.” He strode to his patrol car. “Get on home,” he called over his shoulder. “I'll talk to you later, you and Ellie both. State cops will want to, too, I imagine.”

No kidding; I felt my shoulders slump at the thought. But then he turned. “Jake.”

“Yeah?” He didn't look happy, and he couldn't say
Good job
. It hadn't been. But . . .

“You really are the snoopiest woman I ever met,” he told me finally, his mouth forming a grudging smile. “And by the way, I gave Victor a call. He's headed for the hospital to meet Rickert.”

To do the surgery, he meant, if it turned out Mac was still a candidate for any. I felt a spark of hope, but puzzlement, too.

Victor had barely been gone a day; I hadn't known he was home. “And Marge Cathcart woke up,” Bob added. “She'll be able to see Wanda when the ambulance gets there.”

He started the squad car. “I sure wish winter would come,” he finished with a touch of wistfulness. “Freeze things good and solid, maybe I could get a minute's peace once in a blue moon.”

“Sure,” I said carelessly, not thinking much of it. Wishing for winter was a chronic thing with Bob. His job became vastly less stressful when the last of the summer visitors departed and the rest of us were trapped inside by the cold.

But that time his wish came true, because the next day winter did come.

Along with something else.

Something I still haven't figured out.

The following afternoon,
soon after I replaced the money in my cash stash—the envelope of bills looking lonely without the Bisley there behind the loose brick—my father arrived with the box he'd dug out of the mortar from the cellar wall.

“Here it is,” he announced proudly as he carried it up the front steps.

The
new
front steps. Because as it turns out, what it takes me weeks to do can be accomplished in a few hours by a carpenter who's not following instructions out of a how-to book. One, for instance, like Ellie's husband George, who thinks of power tools simply as extensions of his hands, and uses them as easily.

Now the new wood glowed richly under a coating of ice; the cold front reaching down from Canada behind the storm was like a hand from a morgue refrigerator, gripping us by our throats and polishing the steps with a sneaky layer of slipperiness.

“Drain holes,” George said. “I'll drill drain holes in 'em.”

To keep water from pooling on them, he meant. But not right that minute; we were all too curious to see what the box held. My father brought it into the dining room and set it on the table.

“It's
beautiful,
” Ellie breathed at the dark cherry top and elaborate inlay figures delicately set into it. At the center was a rose, while fanciful birds adorned each corner and a checkered strip ran around the edges inside the raised trim.

“And you've cleaned it up so well. How did you get all that concrete off it?” Ellie asked.

He straightened proudly. “Steel wool so fine you could polish a baby's bottom with it, and olive oil mixed with just the right amount of . . . well, I ain't saying.”

He waved a lean hand at Bella Diamond, hovering over the box there with us. “She came up with the recipe, deserves the most credit,” he said.

“Oh, go on with you,” Bella reacted gruffly, but with an interesting little glance at my father that I thought boded well for the future.

“That inlay's hand done,” George said, admiring it. “Somebody spent a lot of hours on each o' them birds.”

“And the finish,” Wade agreed, “was hand mixed.” In his gun-shop work he often concocted finishes so the repairs matched the originals. “Wish the guy had left us
that
secret recipe,” he added with a touch of craftsman's envy.

My father took the top off with a ceremonial flourish. “And inside . . .”

“Oh,” we said softly together. Inside lay a book bound in dark leather. Over the years the leather had dried but not so much as to crack or disfigure itself, and the golden curlicues stamped decoratively into the cover still gleamed.

“One hundred and eighty-one years ago, give or take a year,” my father said reverently. “That's how old the house is, and they built the foundation first.”

So the book was at least that old, too. “Age isn't the most interesting thing about it, though,” he went on.

He lifted the volume, presenting it to me. Hesitantly I took it, feeling the surprising weight of it in my hands.

Whatever he had done to repair the little hole he'd drilled in it, he'd done invisibly. “Open it,” my father said gently.

So I did.

The dream was always the same, its events proceeding simply
and exactly as they'd happened in real life.

Exactly
as they'd happened: Six weeks after Jenna Durrell died in the water off Tall Island, I sat in the rocking chair by Victor's bed in the guest room in my old house.

He opened his eyes. “Hello,” he said thickly.

The clinic treatment hadn't worked and after that it was all downhill fast. The operation Victor did to remove the bullet from Mac Rickert's skull was the last surgery he ever performed.

“Hello, Victor,” I answered, leaning forward so he could see me. If he could. Lately I wasn't sure. “I'm here,” I said.

A faint smile touched his lips. After performing the surgery on Rickert, he'd arranged for Rickert's transfer to a rehab place in Portland, and referred Wanda Cathcart to some experts he knew in New York for evaluation of her language deficiency.

“Jake,” Victor said, and closed his eyes again, his fingers plucking restlessly at the top of his linen sheet.

Outside it was snowing, white flakes swirling thickly past the window in the pale, bluish early-morning light. “I'm here,” I said again, not knowing if he could hear me.

Only after Wanda had seen for herself that Rickert was alive and expected to make a full recovery had she agreed to go for the evaluation.

“After that,” Marge Cathcart had told me of the bond between Rickert and her daughter, “we'll have to see.” But it was clear she understood that Mac had saved Wanda's life, and that whatever else might be true about him, the unlikely pair loved one another.

“She was protecting me,” Marge said of why Wanda hadn't told
her
about Eugene Dibble's murder. Wanda had known Marge was no match for Jenna, while Hetty and Greg would save only themselves if push came to shove. And how likely were the police to believe an odd girl with a bat in her sleeve, even in the event that she managed to make them understand?

“Edward Jenner,” Victor whispered, then slept again.

If it was sleep. I leaned forward anxiously. His breath came at last, then another, lifting the blue and white quilt that the ladies at the medical center had made for him.

Blue for the sky, they'd said when they brought it; white for the summer clouds they prayed he would get well to see again.

But they'd known he wouldn't, and now cold winds rattled the storm windows as if trying to get in.

I sat back. Wade and I had agreed together that Victor must come here, and by that time he was in no position to argue. Sam spent most evenings here, too, and we had a hospice nurse. But she wouldn't be on duty for another hour or so.

Monday lay watchfully on the floor beside me, Prill in the hall. Astonishingly, Cat Dancing had stationed herself at Victor's feet, refusing to be moved.

After a while Ellie came to the door. “He's asleep?”

“I think so.” Together we'd put the hospital bed in the room, Wade and George lugging its parts up the stairs for us. Now a tiny piece of white toast with quince jam on it lay uneaten on a plate on the bedside table.

“Bob Arnold called,” she said. “He said you'd want to know a grand jury indicted Hetty Bonham for being an accomplice in more kinds of fraud than you can shake a stick at.”

The poor-abused-Hetty story had been a lie, it turned out, along with all Greg and Hetty's supposed family history together. They'd been partners in crime, nothing more; why Hetty had been so vehement about Eugene Dibble's past—which
did
turn out to be true—was still her secret.

But I thought I could guess. Victor muttered something that I couldn't make out.

“Is Lee still wearing the mask?” I asked, mostly to distract myself.

As if I could. “Yes,” Ellie smiled. “She won't take it off, or the rest of the getup, either.”

For Halloween we'd had a record number of trick-or-treaters up the new front steps. To greet them, little Lee had been dressed as a baby goblin, and she'd fallen in love with the outfit.

The holiday had also conferred an unexpected benefit on me; at a party at the Happy Landings Café a pretty young high school teacher visiting our island from New York had suffered a costume malfunction so spectacular, so revealing, and so nearly certain to have been deliberate, it wiped me and my doings right off the map in the gossip department.

“I'll check on you later,” Ellie said, and closed the door. Victor's eyes opened at the latch click, his lips moving without sound.

I reached out. “What is it?” His fingers closed around mine.

“Jake,” he murmured. “Do you forgive me?”

And for once I knew just what to say to him. “Oh, Victor,” I replied, letting a little impatience into my voice so he would be sure to believe me.

“Victor, you know I forgave you everything the first minute I laid eyes on you.”

When the recurring
dream ended I lurched up in bed. Wade slept beside me, sitting up with his reading glasses slipped to the end of his nose and his book splayed open under his hand.

Outside a blizzard howled massively, gusts of wind shaking the old house. When I drew back an edge of curtain to look out, I found the windows thickly plastered over with snow.

Tiptoeing to Wade's side of the bed, I eased his glasses off and plucked the book from his fingers, then snapped the light out and crept from the room. As I went I heard him slide down under the covers and turn over in his sleep.

Passing the open guest room door I looked in, unable to stop myself. But of course it was empty, the hospital bed dismantled and taken away weeks earlier. Downstairs the dogs followed me to the dining room, where I flipped the light switch without result.

The storm had taken the power out, and I supposed the snow made it difficult for the town men to get to the generator. So I lit candles and placed them around the room; then, wrapping my robe around myself against the chill, I sat down with the book my father had dug from the cellar.

The cover felt soft, smooth as skin. Hesitantly I opened it, fear and wonder stirring together in my heart. Inside was line after line of writing in a fine antique hand, each consisting of a single name.

Ship's captain James Waldron, for instance, was the very first inhabitant of my house; his was also the first name in the book, which had been hidden—there'd been no evidence, according to my father, of any more recent tampering with that section of the foundation—for nearly two hundred years.

I drew my finger down a page, one of forty or so bound by hand into the volume. A tiny hole pierced them—the injury done by that drill bit of my father's wasn't fixable on the inside, as it turned out—but they were all still perfectly readable.

Following the old sea captain's came more names, line after line of them. The ink and the penmanship never changed, though; all the entries in the book had been made by the same person.

Turning the last page I paused, once more unable to believe my eyes. In a volume written and hidden long ago by an unknown person, for reasons as mysterious to me as the dark side of the moon, the final entry was as familiar to me as my own two hands.

Or my face in a mirror. A dreamlike feeling seized me but this was no dream. I put out my finger and traced the old lines of antique ink; so odd, so utterly impossible.

But the book was real, lying open before me.

And my own name was in it.

SARAH GRAVES lives with her husband in Eastport, Maine, in the 1823 Federal-style house that helped inspire her books. She is currently at work on her next Home Repair Is Homicide mystery, which Bantam will publish in hardcover in 2007.